In a brief time, Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith demonstrated how much he dislikes — no, is actively hostile to — the very idea of America itself.
Our self-proclaimed Christian Nationalist lieutenant governor first came up with a brainstorm that all public officials should be required to swear loyalty to the Judeo-Christian tradition. This was part of his ongoing campaign of persecution against Muslims.
At first, Beckwith — scholar of history and constitutional law that he is — seemed to argue that Hoosiers just could implement this bit of bigotry with a simple vote.
Someone less illiterate than our lieutenant governor pointed out to him that both the U.S. Constitution and the Indiana Constitution prohibit religious tests.
Article Six of the U.S. Constitution includes the words “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”
The Indiana Constitution, if anything, is even more straightforward. Article One, Section Five says flatly, “No religious test shall be required, as a qualification for any office of trust or profit.”
Beckwith nonetheless decided that we need to change both constitutions, implying that this somehow would put this state and country back on the path the founders intended for us to walk.
He’s wrong about that.
The reason those provisions are in the U.S. Constitution and the Indiana Constitution — and are in most American state constitutions, for that matter — is that many Americans of the revolutionary generation, my ancestors among them, fled religious persecution.
They considered a government that could exercise control over the conscience and the soul to be the essence of tyranny.
If Micah Beckwith had started spouting nonsense about giving government the power to pick and choose among faith traditions, many early Americans — again, my ancestors among them — would have considered him an ill-informed, poorly educated buffoon.
This brings us to Beckwith’s second inspired delusion.
As schoolchildren began returning to Indiana classrooms, our lieutenant governor posted the following on Facebook:
“With the new school year now here, I urge all parents to keep a close eye on what their children are being taught in the classroom.
“Your tax dollars are meant to be spent on teachers preparing Hoosier kids with the skills they need to become productive members of society in the future, not for promoting some individual activist’s radical ideology or telling children they can now choose their own genders.
“If you see anything like this happening with your own kids, please speak out publicly ASAP and feel free to contact my office.
“Indiana parents and children deserve better.”
Once again, Beckwith is making stuff up.
His suggestion that our public schools are supposed to be nothing other than career-training institutions is false to our core.
The rationale for requiring taxpayers to fund schools is Jeffersonian in nature.
Thomas Jefferson was our third president of the United States, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and a man known in his time and thereafter as the apostle of liberty. He argued for a system of public education as a necessity for free people to be able to govern themselves. He wanted Americans to be exposed not just to as many disciplines as possible, but also to different ideas so that they would learn how to distinguish truth from falsehood.
The notion that he intended our schools to be restricted to worker training is laughable. Jefferson thought that trade corrupted the human spirit and that only those who tilled the earth could be counted among nature’s noble men and women.
Besides, if the only purpose of an education were to produce worker bees, Jefferson wouldn’t have required the taxpayers to pony up the cash. He would have demanded that businesses themselves do so because those businesses not only were the ones who stood to benefit from the investment, but they would do it better and more efficiently.
There’s a link between these two Beckwith positions.
Each demonstrates how much our lieutenant governor abhors independent thought. The notion that there are people who don’t think or worship exactly the way he does just drives him nuts.
But it was to preserve the right to determine our own beliefs and speak our own minds that the founders — again, my ancestors among them — fought a war.
If Micah Beckwith had been alive during the 1770s and 1780s, he wouldn’t have been on the side of the guys wearing blue.